The Idea and the Execution

            In 1942, Alfred Hitchcock made a movie called Saboteur. It starred Robert Cummings as an ordinary guy framed for a crime in California, who had to flee across the country to establish his innocence, and it ended with a fight to the death atop the Statue of Liberty.

            It was maybe the 20^th best movie Hitchcock ever made, and is seldom seen today, except at Hitchcock film retrospectives.

            In 1959, 17 years later, Hitchcock made a movie called North by Northwest. It starred Cary Grant as an ordinary guy framed for a crime in New York, who had to flee across the country to establish his innocence, and it ended with a fight to the death atop Mount Rushmore.

            It’s widely regarded, half a century later, as a masterpiece, one of the best movies Hitchcock ever made.

Same Idea; Different Execution

            The discerning reader will no doubt have noted that Saboteur and North by Northwest were essentially the same movie. Except that they weren’t, and the contrast between them shows the difference that the execution of an idea makes.

            As a mystery novelist, I’m often asked where I get my ideas. My standard reply is that ideas are all over the place and any idiot can find one. The hard part is turning ideas into a coherent story, with lively and interesting characters and details.

            In a book, the author has to get everything right without much assistance. In a movie, the actors can make a huge difference. Robert Cummings was no Cary Grant, and while he did a capable job, he didn’t hold the screen the way Grant did. Similarly, the villains in the first film were not particularly memorable, whereas James Mason and Martin Landau in the latter gave such vivid performances they immediately come up in the mind’s eye, when you think about the picture.

A Matter of Tone

            North by Northwest had a better script, too, credited to Ernest Lehman. The script for Saboteur was nothing to sneer at (Dorothy Parker worked on it, for crying out loud), but about the only line I remember is Cummings’ “Who’d listen to me? I’m just an ordinary guy from Glendale, California,” which was the inspiration for the title of this blog.

            The really big difference between the two was the tone. Saboteur was released when America had just entered World War II, and the outcome was far from certain. It dealt with enemy sabotage, and the tone of the picture, despite several engagingly pleasant light moments, was pretty serious. At that point in time, a light-hearted espionage thriller would have been neither appropriate nor well received by audiences.

            North by Northwest, on the other hand, is a sure-handed, light-hearted romp from start to finish. The villains are simply villains, the situations are more over-the-top (think of Grant being attacked by a crop duster in the middle of a cornfield), and no one seems surprised by anything. It’s as if Hitchcock saw the story anew and realized, “Ah, this is the way to handle it.” Moviegoers everywhere are delighted he decided on a do-over.

The Death of San Juan Bautista

            Near the beginning of my newspaper days, I got sent on an assignment I still remember. It would probably have been some time in 1973. The town of San Juan Bautista (best known for having scenes of Hitchcock’s Vertigo shot there) was about to die, and I was sent out to do the post mortem.

            That little old mission town, located a few miles off U.S. 101, had a population of just under 2,000 people at the time. The principal employer and only industrial activity was a cement plant or quarry that employed about 200, and the owners had decided it was no longer economically viable, so they shut it down.

            The mayor, who may also have been the head of the Chamber of Commerce, was in all the Bay Area newspapers, lamenting the imminent death of the town, owing to the loss of its largest employer. One of the Bay Area TV stations had done a story that was picked up by the CBS Evening News. My boss decided that even though it would require paying 12 cents a mile for a 50-mile round trip, we had to have the story. My salary then was so low it didn’t even figure into the cost consideration.

The Community’s Last Gasp

            Photographer Sam Vestal and I went over after lunch to get the story. The mayor was unable to meet with us until late in the afternoon, so we figured we’d do some man-in-the-street interviews and capture the community angst about the catastrophic business closing being the town’s death knell.

            Actually, the town looked pretty good when we drove in a little after two o’clock. There were no boarded up buildings on the main street, and the restaurant scene looked fairly lively. I figured it was the last gasp of looking good before the inevitable collapse. Sam parked the car and we went into a store to ask the shopkeeper how long she expected to stay in business now that the plant had closed.

            Instead of the tale of woe we were expecting, we got a derisive snort and a stream of unprintable language about the mayor. The shopkeeper explained that most of the people who worked in the closed facility didn’t live in town and that the burg had become such a mecca for antiques shoppers that it was thriving. She made it pretty clear that any municipal obituary would be premature.

Things Not What They Seemed

            I figured I’d gotten lucky and scored my contrarian quote (or as much of it as I could use in a family newspaper) right off the bat. But when the next half-dozen people we talked to all said the same thing, it began to dawn on me. Maybe the news stories were wrong, and the town was OK. When we finally got in to see the mayor and he began hemming and hawing as I raised those points, I knew I was on to something.

            We got back to the office, and I wrote a story about a town that had suffered a major business closure, but wouldn’t die because tourism had become big enough to keep it going. Forty years later, my story holds up pretty well. In fact when I tried to go on the Internet to find out about the closed business, there was nothing about it in any of the usual sources. The business whose death was supposed to take the town with it has been entirely forgotten.

            But I haven’t forgotten the lesson of that experience and hope I never will. Reduced to its simplest form, it’s this: Be skeptical of the first version of the story.

Struggling With Implausibilities

            In Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, Cary Grant is lured to a deserted country crossroads on the Illinois prairie, where, in one of the movie’s most memorable moments, the bad guys try to kill him by strafing him with a crop duster. It’s a tribute to Hitchcock’s skill that the most implausible part about it, as it’s happening, is the aftermath: Grant has his suit, stained with topsoil and fertilizer, sponge-cleaned at his hotel in Chicago, then wears it to cocktails downstairs.

            Afterwards, of course, it unravels when you start thinking about it. Who on earth would try to get rid of somebody that way? Why not just plug him when he left the hotel? Or do a drive-by shooting at the deserted crossroads? But the art of Hitchcock, and many another good storyteller, lies in the gift of making the viewer or reader suspend disbelief. It’s accomplished by handling the wildly implausible with a combination of self-assurance and panache. Done right it dispels (or at least delays) the audience’s rational analysis of what it’s seen or read.

The Conventions of a Mystery

            The mystery-thriller genre couldn’t exist without an audience’s willingness to let go of reality for a while. In my book TheMcHenry Inheritance, for example, the protagonist is a man on vacation, who gets sucked in to the investigation of a murder that occurs where he is fishing.

            That character is descended from a long line of “amateur” detectives in books and movies going back more than a century. Readers have come to accept that convention, however implausible it might be. Some authors try to make the amateur more plausible by making him or her a private investigator, but even a private eye almost never plays a significant role in a murder investigation. There’s a reason it’s called fiction.

            As far as I know, there are no statistics on how often someone gets caught by the bad guys and lives to tell about it. I’m guessing about one in five hundred, but in books and movies the good guy always gets away. Either the villains unaccountably stash the hero somewhere for no apparent reason, allowing opportunity for a clever escape, or the police (or other good guys) show up at the last second and stave off disaster.

            Why not just kill the captive and get it over with, the rational mind screams. The only possible answer lies in what a judge I know likes to say about criminals. “If they weren’t dumb, we wouldn’t catch ‘em.”

Working Through the Implausibility

            Dealing with these implausible situations is a challenge for a writer of mysteries and thrillers. There are several approaches, none of which is entirely satisfactory. A writer can attempt to provide a plausible pretext for why the amateur detective is involved in the investigation or why the evildoers have decided not to kill their prisoner forthwith when they have every reason for doing so.

            In the end, though, a plausible pretext for an implausible action can only be window-dressing. Some writers don’t even try, apparently figuring that if they move the story forward at breakneck speed and rack up a high enough body count, the reader won’t notice the problems. If you write in the genre, you always have do do some hoping like that.

            It’s amusing to hear a reader of a mystery or thriller complain about some detail, like the trajectory of a bullet when the entire story really doesn’t hold up to close scrutiny. In a sense, the minor complaint is a form of backhanded compliment. It means the author did well on the big stuff.